new from oxford

New From Oxford

How did Kurosawa influence George Lucas and Star Wars? Why do critics repeatedly use the adjective “Shakespearean” to

describe Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019)? What are the connections between cinematic portrayals of transgender figures and disability?

Shakespeare and East Asia analyzes Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; conflicting reception of South Korean films and touring productions to London and Edinburgh; and multilingualism in cinema and diasporic theatre in Singapore and the UK.

Features

• The first monograph on Shakespeare on stage and on screen in East Asia in comparative contexts

• Presents knowledge of hitherto unknown films and stage adaptations

• Studies works from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and the UK

• The glossary and chronology provide orientation regarding specialized vocabulary and timeline

Oxford Shakespeare Topics

Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International Affairs at George Washington University where she serves as founding Co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute.

Shakespeare and East AsiaAlexa Alice Joubin

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Contents

List of Illustrations xiA Note on the Text xiii

Prologue: The Cultural Meanings of Shakespeareand Asia Today 1

1. “To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores”:Sound and Spectacle 22

2. “Our toil shall strive to mend”: Politics of Remediation 63

3. An “isle . . . full of noises”: Polyphonic Reception 106

4. “Divided in three our kingdom”: Multilingualismand Diaspora 142

Epilogue 187

Notes 195Acknowledgments 225Glossary 229Further Reading 239A Chronology of Shakespeare and East Asia 245Index 253

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 8/12/2020, SPi

Copyright material. Not for circulation.

Contents

Prologue 1

Plays: Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Hamlet

Media: theatrical film and cinematic stage

1. Sound and Spectacle 22

Play: Macbeth

Media and Genres: Japanese samurai film; Kabuki; Noh;anime film; Asian-American theatre

Directors: Akira Kurosawa, Yukio Ninagawa, Satoshi Kon,John R. Briggs

2. Politics of Remediation 63

Plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, A MidsummerNight’s Dream

Media and Genres: American film, British film,British-Chinese theatre, Hong Kong comedy film,Chinese wuxia and kungfu films, Tibetan film,Taiwanese Beijing opera, huaju parody

Directors: Anthony Chan, Feng Xiaogang, Sherwood Hu,Wu Hsing-kuo, Lee Kuo-hsiu, Michael Almereyda,Edgar Wright

3. Polyphonic Reception 106

Plays: King Lear, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet,The Taming of the Shrew

Media and Genres: Korean period drama film, transgenderperformance, modern Korean theatre, t’alch’ummasked-dance drama, British reception of touring theatre

Directors: Kim Myung-gon, Lee Joon-ik, Oh Tae-suk,Yukio Ninagawa



4. Multilingualism and Diaspora 142

Plays: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet

Media and Genres: Singaporean film and theatremultilingual theatre, British East Asian theatre,American film

Directors: Ong Keng Sen, Chee Kong Cheah,David Tse, Baz Luhrmann

Epilogue 187

Plays: Macbeth, The Tempest, Hamlet


x Contents


Prologue

The Cultural Meanings of

Shakespeare and Asia Today

Performance is a doubly acted affair that is shaped not only by thecharacters but also by the actors. Actors embody characters acrosshistory and culture. Adaptations, meanwhile, are strangers at home.They defamiliarize canonical works and everyday utterances whileoffering something recognizable through a new language and form.When Viola, disguised as page boy Cesario, and finding herself

pursued by the lovelorn Olivia, declares that “I am the man . . . shewere better love a dream” in Twelfth Night (2.2.25–26), she speakswith double irony as a doubly cross-dressed boy actor on the earlymodern English stage (such as Nathan Field, 1587–1619) and asan adult male actor (Johnny Flynn) in Mark Rylance’s all-male pro-duction at the Globe Theatre in London in 2012 (dir. Tim Carroll). InYukio Ninagawa’s 2005 Kabuki Twelfth Night, Onoe KikunosukeV brought a new perspective to the notion of gender fluidity whenhe played in rapid succession Viola, her twin brother Sebastian, andher alter ego Cesario. As an otokoyaku (actress specializing in maleroles) in the all-female Takarazuka musical production (dir. KimuraShinji, 1999) derived from shōjo (teen girl) mangas, Yamato Yuga’sViola would embody enticing gender fluidity when speaking Japanese,a language that often elides the subject. Since the genre of Takarazukais an all-female production, Viola’s Cesario would not be the onlycross-dressing character. Otokoyaku actresses present the “sensitivemasculinity” of idealized male characters for a predominantly femaleaudience.1 In addition to making the right choice of employingthe familiar or the polite register, based on the relation between the


Shakespeare and East Asia. Alexa Alice Joubin, Oxford University Press (2021). © Alexa Alice Joubin.


speaker and the addressee, male and female speakers of Japaneseare restricted by the gender-specific first-person pronouns availableto them. The gender dynamics in Twelfth Night worked well forTakarazuka, which is known for its romantic, extravagant musicals.2

Similarly, gendered code-switching creates semantic ambiguity in KeiOtozuki’s double performance of both twins, Viola and Sebastian.Having played exclusively male roles in the Takarazuka Revue untilher retirement in 2012, Kei brings a unique perspective to her roles inTwelfth Night, the second Shakespeare production in Japanese, with aJapanese cast, directed by John Caird, honorary associate director ofthe Royal Shakespeare Company (Nissay Theatre, Tokyo, March2015).3 It was a rare opportunity to see an actress specializing inmale roles play Viola, Cesario, and Sebastian.

In general, syntactical differences create linguistic and culturalopportunities in articulating anew Orsino’s comments about lovefrom a masculinist perspective and Viola’s apology for a woman’slove when in disguise (2.4.78–125)—or the exchange between Oliverand Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede on her “lacking a man’s heart”when she swoons, nearly giving herself away in As You Like It(4.3.164–76). These are but a few examples of how the phenomenonof global Shakespeare reshapes academia, festivals, and theatre circuits.Touring Shakespeare performances and globally circulated films havebecome a staple at international festivals, allowing audiences to appre-ciate the vitality of world cinema and theatre.

Since the nineteenth century, stage and film directors have mountedhundreds of adaptations of Shakespeare drawn on East Asian motifsand styles and performed in Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese,Cantonese, Taiwanese, English, Singlish, Hokkien, and a wide rangeof dialects. Some of the works have originated outside Asia, whereasothers have toured from Asia to the West to critical acclaim. Theyhave been recognized as among the most innovative in the world.The first Asian-language performances of Shakespeare took place atdifferent points in history within comparable contexts of moderniza-tion: 1885 in Japan, 1913 in China, 1925 in Korea, and 1949 inTaiwan.4 Performing Shakespeare in Asian styles has constituted anact of defamiliarization for audiences at home and abroad. By the latetwentieth century, Shakespeare had become one of the most frequentlyperformed playwrights in East Asia.


2 Shakespeare and East Asia


Hamlet has been a popular play for political appropriation. Notably,Chinese director Lin Zhaohua staged his production of Hamlet(Hamulaite) in the wake of the student demonstration in Tian’anmenSquare and the Chinese government’s crackdown on the democraticmovement in Beijing, which culminated in the massacre on June 4,1989. Lin’s Hamlet (1989, 1990, 1994), set in contemporary China,used three actors to play the titular character (among other roles) inorder to demarcate different stages of psychological development ofthe prince. The director extrapolated something extraordinary fromHamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (3.1.58–92; delivered alter-nately and collectively by the three actors) to drive home the messagethat, in his postsocialist society, “everyone is Hamlet,” and Hamlet isone of us. The production paid tribute to the student protestors’boldness in awakening China to the vision of a democratic, civilsociety. To view the full production (1995 version), visit the pagecurated by Alexa Alice Joubin on the MIT Global Shakespeares: globalshakespeares.mit.edu/hamulaite-lin-zhaohua-1995/Two centuries of Asian interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays such

as Hamlet and Macbeth are now making a world of difference in howwe experience Shakespeare. Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (basedon Macbeth, Toho Studios, 1957; starring Toshirô Mifune) and Ran(based on King Lear, Herald Ace and Nippon Herald Films, 1985)—while now canonical in the study of Shakespeare—are far from theearliest or the only Shakespeare films from East Asia. There are severalnotable early twentieth-century silent film adaptations. Around thetime that Asta Nielsen’s gender-bending Hamlet (dir. Svend Gadeand Heinz Schall, 1921) was filmed, silent-film adaptations of TheMerchant of Venice (Nü lüshi [Woman Lawyer], also known as Rou-quan [Bond of Flesh], dir. Qiu Yixiang, Tianyi Film, 1927; starringHu Die [aka Butterfly Hu] as Portia) and The Two Gentlemen ofVerona (Yi jian mei [A Spray of Plum Blossoms], dir. Bu Wancang,Lianhua Film, 1931; starring Ruan Lingyu as Julia [Hu Zhuli]) werebeing made in Shanghai and marketed to the European expatriateand Chinese diasporic communities there and in Canton (today’sGuangzhou) and Southeast Asia. An explosion of bold and imagina-tive interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays has occurred sincethe 1990s, many of which aim to attract audiences in multiplelocations around the world. The beginning of the new millennium


Prologue: Meanings of Shakespeare and Asia Today 3


was for Asian Shakespeares as the 1990s were for Anglo-AmericanShakespeare on film.

This book traces shared and unique patterns in post-1950s appro-priations of Asian and Western motifs across theatrical and cinematicgenres. These visions of otherness are located in East Asia, the USA,the UK, and other cultures. The Czech-based artist Nori Sawa com-bined Japanese Bunraku and Czech puppets in his widely toured solomarionette theatre adaptations of Macbeth (1999), Romeo and Juliet(2000), and King Lear (2004). The culturally hybrid approach toperformance has been a signature in his international career since1992.5 A Bunraku puppet represents Ariel in Julie Taymor’s 1986Off-Broadway production of The Tempest for the Classic Stage Com-pany in New York City.6 The puppet’s head floated above the stageworking its magic in various scenes. Prospero freed both the spirit andthe puppeteer in the final scene, fusing fiction with reality. Similar toSawa, Taymor brought together classical Japanese theatre and theItalian commedia dell’arte in a visual feast. Kenneth Branagh’s Japan-esque film As You Like It (BBC and HBO, 2006) attempts some formof cultural ventriloquism through its use of film and imaginary loca-tions: Wakehurst Place dressed up with a Zen garden, shrine gate, andtrappings of a nineteenth-century Japan torn between samurai andEuropean merchants. The intercultural fusion is reflected by Rosalin’sand Celia’s Victorian dresses during the sumo match betweenOrlando and Charles (Fig. 1). Sitting behind them, Duke Frederickdons dark samurai armor. Both As You Like It and the dream ofJapan are deployed ornamentally in the filmmaker’s signature visualromanticism (e.g., Orlando’s love letters in Japanese kanji).7 These arebut a few examples of hybrid Asian-Western aesthetics. Morerecently, South Korean director Chan-wook Park’s American debutfilm Stoker (Fox Searchlight, 2013) features India Stoker (MiaWasikowska) as a female Hamlet figure. Well known for his eclectic,Korean-language revenge thriller Oldboy (CJ Entertainment, 2003),Park ventures into English-language filmmaking with Stoker, which isnot explicitly marketed as an Asian adaptation of Hamlet but isrecognized by many reviewers as a film with Freudian-inflected,Hamletian elements.8

How do Anglophone directors such as Taymor and Branagh useimaginaries of Asia differently from directors based in Asia, such as




the larger-than-life cherry tree in the widely toured production ofMacbeth (1980) directed by Yukio Ninagawa? Conversely, what cul-tural logic governs the circulation and reception of works by EastAsian directors, such as Stoker by Park, Nori Sawa’s puppet theatre,and Throne of Blood by Kurosawa? Why do critics repeatedly use theadjective “Shakespearean” to describe the genre fluidity of SouthKorean director Bong Joon-ho’s quadruple Academy Award-winningParasite (Barunson E&A, 2019), which features a unique tonal blendof tragic, comic, lyrical, and horror elements?9 More so than Kurosa-wa’s films, Bong’s Korean-language film has transcended what hecalled “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to reach large, inter-national audiences.10 How do the crossovers between theatricalizationand cinematic conventions enrich performances? Directors see thecopresence of Shakespearean and non-Western motifs as a uniqueopportunity, and they use select cultural elements drawn from dispar-ate genres, such as conventionalized gender presentations andChinese martial arts sequences, as common denominators and bond-ing agents between different periods and cultural locations. The artists’racial identities can sometimes incriminate them in ethnic selling outor cultural imperialism. In other contexts, however, their culturalorigins and locations exonerate them from cultural appropriation.

Fig. Prol. 1 Branagh’s As You Like It. Rosalin (Bryce Dallas Howard), Celia(Romola Garai), and Duke Frederick (Brian Blessed) at the sumo match betweenOrlando (David Oyelowo) and Charles (Nobuyuki Takano).




Directors—regardless of their cultural affiliations—working withAsian motifs often have to contend with their regionally markedcultural identity. Their works are compelled to respond to the com-peting demands to inhabit simultaneously the local and the global, tobe innovative but conservative enough to be palatable, to representAsia on the world market, and to be the conveyor of an AnglophoneWest to Asian audiences and vice versa.

This book is titled Shakespeare and East Asia, rather thanShakespeare in East Asia, to signal the interplay between the twocondensed cultural signifiers and to emphasize a shift away from thelinear, one-way-street model of tracing the transplantation of aBritish “giant” into a colonial cultural context. This false dichotomybetween the native and the foreign can be broken down whenwe consider global Shakespeare performances in the contextof cross-media and cross-cultural citations, the cultural vibrationlinking productions in different cultures. Adaptations reference orecho one another, across cultures and genres, in addition to theShakespearean pretext.

Asian interpretations of Shakespeare matter to Western readersbecause of their impact on American and European performancecultures, as exemplified by the worldwide recognition of the works ofAkira Kurosawa, Ong Keng Sen, and Oh Tae-suk. The pairing of aWestern playwright with a set of Asian performance practices provideshistorically necessary and heuristically illuminating cases of filmmak-ing and theatre making.11 The clashes and confluences of Asia andShakespeare give a “local habitation” to the “airy nothing” of global-ization (AMidsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.17–18). Asian Shakespeares aresufficiently complex and coherent as a system of signification to interfaceglobal cultural studies. For instance, through Asian Shakespearesmetacritical inquiries may be launched into how Shakespeare and Asiahave been used as cultural signifiers in competing narratives aboutgender, race, and nation. Further, non-Anglophone interpretationsof Shakespeares matter to readers because the expansion of Englishstudies is currently occurring “outside the discipline’s traditionalAnglophone . . . base.” In his study of literary prestige, James Englishhas called for scholars “at the presumptive center of things to beginpaying more attention to the forms our discipline is taking at [those]sites of rapid expansion.”12




Compulsory Realpolitik

Performance creates varied pathways to dramatic and cultural mean-ings across history, but polity-driven historiography has constructedlinear, synchronic narratives that have been flattened by nationalprofiling, a tendency to characterize a non-Western artwork basedon stereotypes of its nation of origin and to regard, for example,South Korean adaptations of Shakespeare as political allegories ofthe postwar tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The problem hereis one of compulsory realpolitik—the conviction that the best wayto understand non-Western works is by interpreting their engage-ment with pragmatic politics. This approach may impose intention-ality upon directors and imply that their works are of interest solelybecause of their testimonial value. The approach runs the risk ofturning global Shakespeares into “mere curiosities or colonialremnants.”13

As a cultural institution, Shakespeare registers a broad spectrum ofvalues and practices that rivals the complexity of the freighted notionof Asia. Consider, for example, the divergent Shakespeares paradox-ically branded by the Globe Theatre in London,14 by the AmericanShakespeare Center and Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia,and by a slew of such institutions as the Panasonic Globe in Tokyo(1988–2002) and replicas of the first (1599) and second (1614) Globetheatres being planned for Beijing, Stratford (Connecticut), and Riode Janeiro.15 Likewise, the dissemination of knowledge of Asian stylesof performance has been fraught with the politics of recognition andbranding. Early examples include Madame Sadayakko’s (1871–1946)quintessentially Japanese performances in the United States andEurope16 and Mei Lanfang’s (1894–1961) transformation of jingju(Beijing opera) into guoju (national opera) and a form of “tacticalOrientalism” in Moscow (where Bertolt Brecht was inspired to createhis theory of the alienation effect), inWashington, DC, and eventuallyon Broadway.17 As Fredric Jameson puts it in his working definition,globalization has become “an untotalizable totality which intensifiedbinary relations between its parts.”18

The first phase of sustained study of global Shakespeare perform-ance unfolded over the past two decades and has brought nationalpolitical histories to bear on the story of Shakespeare in global




contexts. There are detailed histories of national Shakespeares inwhich “Shakespeare in India” is shorthand for postcolonial, politicalmerits of adaptations of Shakespeare that serve as a tool for resistingWestern hegemony. South Korean Shakespeares would be seen asallegories of the divide between North and South Korea, while main-land Chinese works on world tours would be thought to contain attenu-ated allusions to the Cultural Revolution. Anglophone Shakespearesare assumed to have broad theoretical applicability and aesthetic merits,whereas foreign Shakespeares—even when they focus on artistic innov-ation on a personal rather than an epic level—are compelled to provetheir political worth. Critics are on the lookout for potentially subversivepolitical messages in these works, which are compulsorily characterizedas allegories of geopolitical issues.

There are a number of implications of this approach, which isolatesperformances in their perceived cultural origins. It could miss the richintertexts between performance traditions; most adaptations borrowfrom more than one culture. It could subsume local history underShakespeare criticism or vice versa. It could also imply that works fromthe Global South or Asia, assumed to be operating as national alle-gories, are valuable only for their political messages rather than theiraesthetic merits, leading to research questions driven by polity—forexample, “Why are there so many global Shakespearean adaptations incultures with no love for Great Britain?”19 Last, but not least, thefetishization of political merits could unduly emphasize global Shake-speares’ alleged deviation from Anglophone practices and, in turn,instrumentalize global Shakespeares for the purpose of diversifying thescholarship and curricula in the United Kingdom, the United States,and Canada.20 Though there are valuable monographs on nationalShakespeares, the same cannot be said of performances across genresthat interface with more than one culture or region.21

National profiling—the tendency to bracket, for example,“Shakespeare in Japan” in isolation from other cultural influences—isa symptom of the aforementioned assumption that performances inthe United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada are normativeand aesthetically universal, whereas Shakespeare in Japan bearslocation-specific, often political, meanings—its aesthetic meaningsare either indecipherable or uninteresting. As Rey Chow observes,despite “the current facade of welcoming non-Western ‘others’ into




putatively . . . cross-cultural exchanges,” there is still “a continualtendency to . . . ghettoize non-Western cultures . . . by way of eth-nic, national labels.”22 Due to the current structure of academiaand hierarchies of cultural prestige, Asianists have always been obligedto know their Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Anglo-European critical theories, though scholars of Shakespeare andEuropean literature tend to regard knowledge of Asian writers anddirectors as the responsibility of those who specialize in the subfields.As a result, works by nonwhite authors are imagined to fix

their intellectual content “by way of a national, ethnic, or culturallocation.”23 Western, white examples are assumed to be more effectivein their explanatory power, while African, Asian, and Latin Americanmaterials are recruited to serve as the exceptional particular. HenryLouis Gates Jr. makes a similar observation in his call for developing a“black theory” specifically for the interpretation of African Americanliterature to counter the tendency not to see aesthetic merit in blackliterature. He writes that “black literature and its criticism . . . havebeen put to uses that were not primarily aesthetic; rather, they haveformed part of a larger discourse on the nature of the black, and of hisor her role in the order of things.”24

Equally problematic is the tendency to regard the global and thelocal as politically expedient, diametrically opposed categories of dif-ference in an often-unarticulated agenda to preserve a literary elite.The global is imagined to be “whatever the United States”—and byextension Great Britain—“is not.”25 In reference to the success ofHaruki Murakami’s and Orhan Pamuk’s novels in translation on theWestern literary market, Tim Parks coined the phrase “the dull newglobal novel” to describe what some critics believe to be a neutral styleof writing that lends itself to translation.26 In this view, these novels donot tend to contain culturally specific references or complex linguisticfeatures of their local languages. They use Western motifs to cater tothe taste of Western readers. Karolina Watroba has critiqued this lineof argument about works that are “eminently translatable” due totheir transparency by pointing out that critics of this type of worksassign low aesthetic value to them in the first place: “An undercurrentof elitism is revealed in an ostensibly materialist argument: ‘the local’and ‘the global’ start to sound like code words for ‘highbrow’ and‘lowbrow.’ ”27




Asian Shakespeares give us a category that we can use to develop asite-specific critical vocabulary to address the epistemological founda-tion of histories of cultural globalization. They provide historical mater-ials to bear on the tension between cultural homogenization andheterogenization in global communities.28 This is not to say that studiesof Shakespeare in performance should be eclipsed to give way to Asianfilm and theatre history just because Asia as a whole matters politicallyand economically in what the journalistic discourse bills as an “Asiancentury.” The approach would risk creating new forms of Cold War-speak and epistemological Orientalism.29 “Asiacentricity” is as prob-lematic as “Eurocentricity.”30 As Rossella Ferrari writes, scholarshipshould treat Asian performing arts as “active producers of originalepistemologies rather than merely as providers of ethnographies andderivative adaptations.”31 The story of Asian performance is not andshould not always be political, though the Western media often gravi-tate toward stories of political dissidents. Stories of political oppressionmust be told, but dichotomized views do not get us very far.32

While Asia may, inGayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words, be an “impos-sible interpellation” due to its inherent diversity and incongruity,33 andShakespeare a repository of endless recursive mimesis and theatricalrepetition, each of these cultural conglomerates can be configuredboth to operate as a local canon and simultaneously to project a self-image in new contexts of signification, which is particularly true atinternational festivals and in touring productions. The critical ten-dency to prioritize realpolitik in non-Western works leads to blindspots in our understanding of the logic and significance of AsianShakespeares.

The Postnational Space

Granted, some directors do tap into realpolitik to conceive and markettheir works. Artists and festival organizers have used Shakespeare andAsia as geopolitical and visual markers in past decades to propagatetheir worldviews. Many artists rely on international spectators todisseminate their decidedly local works, and more and more festivalsthrive on the ideological purchase of being “global.”34 However, theydo so as they engage in generic innovation and formalistic experi-ments, both of which aspects tend to be overlooked by critics.




We have now arrived at the cusp of the second phase of globalShakespeare performance; theatre and film artists are challenging fixednotions of tradition and a narrow definition of cultural authenticity.Shakespeare performances have entered a postnational space, whereidentities are blurred by the presence of international performers,tourist audiences, transnational corporate sponsors, and the logic ofinternational festivals. The postnational space shares characteristics ofliminal spaces that are discursively formed. As Ian Watson writes inhis observation of culture (which is defined by inclusion, exclusion,and a sense of belonging), the liminal spaces are sites of “conflict,eruption, compromise, debate, and above all, negotiation.”35 Culturalownership is a fiction, and familiarity with traditional cultural practicesdoes not align with ethnicity. In fact, certain Asian theatrical practicessuch as jingju and Noh are unfamiliar genres on their home turfstoday, and Shakespeare’s language has more immediate impact inmodern translations, even as it grows more distant from the universeof English speakers. Outside the region, Asian cinematic and theatri-cal idioms such as kung fu and jingju are becoming more common inEnglish– and European-language performances.The transnational cultural flows go beyond the scope of geopolitical

divisions of nation-states and cultural profiling. In other words, per-formances have deterritorializing and reterritorializing effects thatunmark the cultural origins of intercultural interpretations becausethey work against assumptions about politically defined geographies.These performances tend to regard such geographies as artificialconstraints that no longer speak to the realities of globalized art. GillesDeleuze and Félix Guattari developed the concept of deterritorializa-tion to analyze cultural relations that are in flux. Deterritorialization isa process that separates cultural practices from their “native” habitatsor points of origin. Performance styles such as Kabuki are available forappropriation by all artists, and, conversely, Japanese directors’ use ofKabuki is not by default more authentic than a French practitioner’sdeployment of Kabuki elements. Touring productions can also reter-ritorialize the plays upon arriving in a new location, taking root in anew venue and taking on local colors.36 As a result, intercultural worksare best understood through theatrically defined cultural locationsinfluenced by transnational networks of collaboration and funding(e.g., a French–Japanese Richard II by Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris




and on tour, or a “culturally neutral”Richard IIImade in Beijing by LinZhaohua, set in a no place, and presented in Berlin).

Therefore, my approach is marked by a fundamental departure fromthe national lens; it emphasizes the connections between distinctiveand often conflicting interpretations of “Shakespeare” and “Asia” indifferent cultural and visual contexts. Numerous performances recastShakespeare and Asia as condensed collective signifiers of culturalvalues through their marketability for audiences in different locations.Outside their country of origin, intercultural works attract audienceswho are enthralled by the performance of the exotic, whether it’sShakespearean or Asian motifs. Within their local market, the namebrand of an editorialized Shakespeare with Anglophone lineage helpsto boost their production value.

Focusing on aesthetic and social functions of performances, thisbook situates adaptations of Shakespeare and Asian narratives in apostnational space of exchange. Chapters do not create or celebratenew centers for the postcolonial cachet of these adaptations, such asthe sentiments expressed by the Calibanization of The Tempest or thequip of Malian singer Ali Ibrahim “Farka” Touré that Timbuktu is“right at the heart of the world” despite its obscurity on the worldmap.37 In addition to giving us a critical category to examine howknowledge about performance is organized, the complexity of thetranshistorical and translingual migrations of Shakespeare and Asianperformance idioms compels us to maintain a productive criticaldistance from assumptions of familiarity and knowability.

My approach, which mines rhizomatic and horizontal connectionsamong adaptations, reevaluates the perceived lack of connectionsbetween a known Western body of dramatic works and lesser-known East Asian traditions. Deleuze and Guattari use the botanicalmetaphor of “rhizome” to describe multiplicities, as opposed to an“arborescent” model of knowledge, which is hierarchic like a tree’strunk and branches.38 A rhizome is characterized by its horizontalstem with lateral shoots. Since a rhizome provides nonlinear, trans-species connections in plants, a rhizomatic network of knowledgecaptures multiplicity more effectively through nonhierarchical entryand exit points in data sets and the interpretations of culture. Myinterpretive model for embodied performances connects what mayotherwise seem to be isolated instances of artistic expression. The




field has come a long way in the four decades since J. L. Styandemonstrated the value of “stage-centered criticism” in Shakespearestudies in 1977.39 The primary focus of Shakespeare criticism in thelate 1990s was on the author-function in performances, though JamesBulman cautioned against replacing “the old textuality with a newform of performance textuality which may be ‘read.’ ” The move wasdriven by recognition of the “multiple material existences” of anysingle play.40 As variously articulated notions of performativity pene-trate ever deeper into cultural studies, the Shakespearean oeuvre is nolonger a repository of “textual obligation[s]” detached from “performa-tive option[s].”41 Concepts such as the politics of visibility and repe-tition with a difference have transformed our understanding of theperpetual struggles for primacy between text and representation, andmy approach acknowledges these theoretical developments.42

Cinematic Stage and Theatrical Film

There are deep connections among adaptations that extend throughdifferent media and genres. Few monographs in the field bring filmand theatre studies together, but the nature of the material at handdemands that these two major genres be placed in a comparativecontext. To account for structural and narratological connectionsthat are articulated through fusions of genres, this book looks atfilms and theatre works to explore the following questions: Whatcultural values associated with Shakespeare do Asian and Westernartists appropriate? Why do characters’ gender identities take a per-sonal turn in appropriations? How do these artists use Shakespeare’splays to reframe modernity and reinvent local and global genres ofperformance in the international circuit of festivals?There are compelling reasons to bring the genres of theatre and film

to bear on each other rather than placing them in isolated silos. Severalworks examined in this book are products of metacinematic andmetatheatrical operations, contestations among genres for primacy,or experimentations with features of disparate genres. It is moreproductive to examine samples from both dominant genres (theatreand film) for comparative analysis. For instance, although scholarshipon global Shakespeare tends to focus more on theatre, East Asiancinema holds an important place in world cultures: Japanese feature




and animation films have become source material for adaptationaround the world; South Korea is projecting soft power through itsexported films, television dramas, and the Korean Wave (hallyu); andHong Kong cinema is the world’s third largest film industry in termsof global influence after Bollywood and Hollywood, according to theUNESCO Institute for Statistics’ 2013 report on cinema infrastruc-ture. Analyzing works of adaptation from a key film culture enhancesour overall understanding of global Shakespeare.

Chapter 1 offers new methods for looking at and listening toShakespearean films and stage productions by focusing on theworks and aesthetic claims of Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa.Kurosawa used traditional Japanese theatrical elements in his cine-matic depictions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; his signaturelong shots, which remain emotionally detached, are echoed inNinagawa’s stage version of Macbeth, particularly in scenes playedbehind semitransparent screen doors. Ninagawa was well known forthe cinematic quality of some of his stage productions, and Kuro-sawa derived inspiration from Noh and Kabuki styles of presentationand makeup.

Among the works discussed in Chapter 2, the theatre occupies acentral place in the Hong Kong comedy film One Husband Too Many(dir. Anthony Chan, 1988). The rustic stage where the play within afilm is mounted serves as both a dramatic device and a venue wherecultural values are negotiated. Following a couple aspiring to introduceWestern culture to backwater Hong Kong through their iffy perform-ance of Romeo and Juliet (itself an imitation of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968period screen version), the film pits the decidedly local vibe of the stageagainst the perceived universal values of cinema. When the onscreenaudience’s booing prompts an unplanned intermission, they do notleave while the couple collect themselves backstage; rather, the audi-ence seems invested in seeing how the production will turn out, even ifthey do not endorse it. Through its protagonist’s Quixotic insistenceon staging Shakespeare for enlightening messages, the film grinninglycontrasts the contrivance of Zeffirelli’s film with any fantasy that theallegedly greatest (British) love story of all time can ameliorate socialconditions in Hong Kong.

One of the films analyzed in Chapter 3, The King and the Clown(dir. Lee Joon-ik, 2005), from South Korea, brings the life of two




fifteenth-century traveling players to bear on Hamletian narrativesof the discoverability of truth. King Yeon-san of the Joseong erahires these vagabond players to help him catch the conscience ofcorrupt court officials. With a transgender figure, the clown, at thecore of its narrative, the film creates ironic distances to both the craftof filmmaking itself and to traditional Korean puppet and cross-gender theatres.The Singaporean film Chicken Rice War (dir. Chee Kong Cheah,

2000), featured in Chapter 4, draws its comedic energy from itsrehearsals and performances of Romeo and Juliet and the offstage lifeof the actors in that college production. The film inserts an aspiringtelevision news anchor to report on the conflicts between two familieswho own competing chicken rice stalls next to each other (“Twofamilies, both alike in dignity and profession . . . ”). Against momentswhere the stage asserts its putative Shakespearean or local authenticity(students performing in English; an elderly woman singing about the“feud” in Cantonese operatic tunes), cinematic elements of camera-work and editing (cutting between shots of the failed stage perform-ance and reaction shots of parents interrupting the performance) striveto reclaim the superiority of film as a genre. As shown in Chapter 4,the film’s opening and closing scenes, narrated by the news anchor,simultaneously parody Shakespeare’s prologue, epilogue, and BazLuhrmann’s film, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Like TheKing and the Clown, Chicken Rice War thrives on the tension betweentheatricalized presentation (such as the play within a play) and veri-similitude in cinematic representation.These crossovers instantiate formalistic experiments and expres-

sions of a range of ideological positions. Though theatre and film aredistinct forms, we gain a fuller understanding of adaptation by takingstock of the cross-currents and common threads between them. Theirintergeneric dynamics are best understood in a holistic context andthrough comparative analysis.

Form, Ideology, Reception, Diaspora

Shakespeare and East Asia identifies four themes that distinguish inter-pretations of Shakespeare in post-1950s East Asia from works in otherparts of the world:




(1) formalistic innovations in sound and spectacle,(2) ideological investments in art’s remedial functions,(3) conflicting and polity-driven production and reception, and(4) multilingualism in diasporic adaptations.

More specifically, these four themes form a series of concentric circlesof analysis that move from form to ideology, from local to globalcontexts, and from production to reception.

The book is structured around modes in which one might encounterAsian-themed performances of Shakespeare. Each chapter—unhindered by divisions of plays or performance genres—offers anapproach to reading particular works. Although there is significantintra-Asian cross-fertilization, each chapter generally examines worksfrom one cultural sphere. There are a multitude of approaches toShakespeare and East Asia, and this book offers but one possiblepath through the historical material. Readers are encouraged toexplore the connections across these works and languages. Many ofthe works selected contain teachable moments and are readily availablein replayable media, such as digital video. Among the criteria forselection have been availability and accessibility, positionality withinAsian and Anglo-European cultures, and curricular applicability.

Since Japan has historically been a gateway for the filtration ofWestern ideas into East Asia, Chapter 1 focuses on the achievementsof Kurosawa’s postwar film version of Macbeth and Ninagawa’s con-temporary stage version. The two directors have been influential inboth the West and Asia: both pioneers—perhaps unwittingly—in theinternationalization of Asian Shakespeares, they were discovered byEnglish-speaking critics early on and became part of the canonicalcritical framework. As the “default” Asian directors for discussion,they have emerged, over time, as more palatable and “less foreign” toWestern minds. Mindful of Ninagawa’s and Kurosawa’s representativefunction in canonical criticism, this chapter delineates methodologies tolisten to and view performances by analyzing the aural, musical, andvisual compositions of Kurosawa’s and Ninagawa’s works. Both direct-ors combine a visual language borrowed from Japanese painting andShakespearean motifs to defamiliarize and unpack stock images ofMacbeth and Japan. A prime example would be Ninagawa’s Macbeth,which takes place under a large cherry tree within an enlarged, stage-size




Buddhist altar for home worship. As Macbeth wades through blood,spring turns to autumn and the petals fall. Another example is the finalscene of Kurosawa’s film. TheMacbeth figure dies from arrows made ofthe forest, symbolizing that the forest encroaches upon his castle toconsume him. Complex and multidimensional, the works of bothdirectors compel us to reexamine our assumptions about Japanese andShakespearean performance cultures.Chapter 2 continues the line of inquiry into the intersections of

form and ideology in the Sinophone world. One prominent strand ofadaptation is an imagined remedial effect that Shakespearean motifsand East Asian aesthetics can have on each other, on the artists, andon the audiences. Works analyzed in this chapter either amplifyShakespeare’s purported remedial merit and instrumentality, using itto promote social justice, or ironize it in parodies of the politicalefficacy of a “reparative” Shakespeare. With case studies from HongKong, Taiwan, and China, this chapter examines the politics ofreform, the myths of Shakespeare’s remedial merit, and the operatingprinciples of these myths. Such metacriticism allows us to movebeyond national profiling by bringing formalistic features to bear onthe ideological purchase of adaptations. Feng Xiaogang’s kung fufeature The Banquet (Ye yan, 2006), for example—made in the samegenre as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2000)—adapts Hamlet in a way that remedially recasts gender roles. The filmgives Gertrude and Ophelia, women characters who are traditionallysilenced, a strong presence. One might even say that The Banquet“rescues” Ophelia from a fate of being silenced by the patriarchy.Parody, on the other hand, provides quite a different take on theidea of remediation. Though the emergence of parodic rewritingscan indicate a society’s familiarity with the Western canon and confi-dence in its own performance genres, there are subtle distinctionsbetween actual familiarity and using parody to construct a familiaritythat does not yet exist. Taiwan, a society moreWesternized than manyof its East Asian neighbors,43 with an American system of secondaryand higher education, has produced more irreverent approaches toShakespeare—a prominent example being Shamlet, Lee Kuo-hsiu’slong-running (since 1994) stage parody. Chapter 2 also situates selectworks in the international contexts of such Hamlet-inflected works asTom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.




Building upon the foundation of formalistic and ideological criticism,Chapter 3 examines the metacritical question of the production andreception of adaptations. It first tunes in to the diverse, both paralleland conflicting, voices behind the production of select works fromSouth Korea in a polyphonic framework. Each of the voices—artisticand political, drawn from shamanistic traditions and Shakespeareannarratives—has its own trajectory, authority, and weight in the arc ofdevelopment of an adaptation from inception to reception. Among thedifferent sites for the engagement of Asia and Shakespeare, two of therichest, yet understudied, cities are London and Edinburgh; there,the commercialization of festivals is complicated by the expectations ofcompulsory realpolitik of Asianized spectacles and, sometimes, Asianexceptionalism. Shakespeare makes Asian theatre legible in the Britishcontext, and Asian performance styles played an important role in therise of Shakespearean theatre as a global genre, as evidenced by theBritish reception of Oh Tae-suk’s Romeo and Juliet (London, 2006)and The Tempest (Edinburgh, 2011). This chapter argues that per-forming Shakespeare in Asian styles and manufacturing Asian iden-tities through Shakespearean theatre are reciprocal processes that havecontributed to the emergence of Asian productions.

Cultural identities are not always rooted in one place or one nationallanguage. Moving from monolingual to multilingual performances,Chapter 4 explores the dilemma of intercultural identity in the Asiandiaspora, examining works that not only feature translation as a pol-itical metaphor but also dramatize the interstitial space among lan-guages. One such case is the aforementioned Singaporean film ChickenRice War, a work that addresses local language policy and global teenculture, critiquing Singapore’s multiracial policies that seek to eraseethnic differences. The chapter also asks: What are the politicalimplications when an English-speaking Singaporean director such asOng Keng Sen appropriates King Lear and Noh theatre to create themultilingual stage work Lear (1997 and 1999), a piece both intracul-tural (“pan-Asian”) and intercultural? Ong’s diasporic backgroundinformed the structure of his pan-Asian, multilingual Lear. Symbol-izing a revisionist history of the Japanese occupation of Singapore(1942–45), the Mandarin-speaking Older Daughter kills herJapanese-speaking father, only to discover that she now inhabits thepatriarchal role she has critiqued. Like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister,




who searches for a national identity through his performance of theprince inHamlet, Ong puts his actors in search of a new Asian identitythrough his multilingual productions. In what ways do Ong’s worksdiffer, formalistically and ideologically, from Ninagawa’s Kabuki-style Macbeth or the British-born but France-based director PeterBrook’s Mahābhārata (1985)? How “Asian” is a touring productionwhen it is specifically designed for the context and taste of audiencesat an international festival? Ong, who was invited in 2009 to speakat the Shakespeare Association of America’s conference and toscreen his Lear in Washington, DC, is not only a leading directorin world theatre but also an influential playwright and curator.His highly self-conscious works are well known for their high-gloss postmodernism.The four chapters of Shakespeare and East Asia thus move through

concentric circles of analysis, from formalistic and sociological criti-cism to reception studies and the politics of multilingualism. Theadaptations examined break new ground in sound and spectacle;they serve as a vehicle for artistic and political remediation or, insome cases, the critique of the myth of recuperation; they provide aforum where diasporic artists and audiences can grapple with contem-porary issues; and, through international circulation, they are reshap-ing debates about the relationship between East Asia and Europe.

Caveat Lector

It should be noted that most of the directors and adapters examined inthis book are male, which has long been a function of the setup ofAsian theatre and film industries, particularly when it comes to adap-tations of Shakespeare. The inequality is stark in the theatre circle,though there are a few prominent female artists, such as ChineseAmerican director Tisa Chang, Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hsiu-wei, and Japanese playwright Kishida Rio. Born in Chongqing, China,and now a key figure in Asian American theatre, Chang founded thePan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York in 1977. Her company’sAsian American adaptation Shogun Macbeth is discussed in Chapter 1.Lin cofounded with her husband, Wu Hsing-kuo, the ContemporaryLegend Theatre in Taipei in 1986. The company’s solo Lear Is Here isdiscussed in Chapter 2. Lin also played a triply masked dancing doll in




the company’s Kingdom of Desire (Beijing opera based onMacbeth, dir.Wu Hsing-kuo, 1987). Kishida is a key collaborator with Singaporeandirector Ong Keng Sen on Lear andDesdemona (Chapter 4). As one ofthe few feminist playwrights in Japan with her own company and amember of the first generation of female directors, Kishida had severalintra-Asian collaborative productions. She is best known outside Japanfor her collaboration with Ong, notably on Lear (1997), a multilingualproduction with performers from Japan, China, Indonesia, Thailand,Singapore, and Malaysia. Unfortunately, these works have come to beknown primarily as Ong’s productions.44

There are, of course, also figures such as Miyata Keiko, a rare,award-winning woman director in a men’s world. She was artisticdirector of the New National Theatre in Japan from 2010 to 2018.The dismissal of Hitoshi Uyama and subsequent appointmentof Miyata was protested by Yukio Ninagawa, Hisashi Inouue,and other leading directors. She has directed productions ofplays by Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller,Ibsen, and others. However, Miyata is not known for adaptationsof Shakespeare.

Wherever possible, I have also made an effort to draw attention toworks by women and gender minorities, such as Komaki Kurihara’slandmark performance of Lady Macbeth (Lady Asaji) in Kurosawa’sfilm Throne of Blood (Chapter 1), or Lee Joon-gi’s embodiment ofGong-gil, a transgender court entertainer, in the film The King andthe Clown (Chapter 3).

Conclusion

The history of East Asian Shakespeares as a body of works—asopposed to random stories about cross-cultural encounter—allows usto understand better the processes of localizing artistic ideas throughtransnational collaboration, processes that can unsettle assumptionsabout the stability of Shakespeare as a textual and verbal presence andabout Asia as a privileged, unified visual sign. Going beyond what hasbeen theorized by Walter Benjamin as the translational mode ofsurvival (Überleben) and continuous, extended life (Fortleben) of art-works,45 adaptations register the negotiations between fiction and




history, between genres and modes of representation, between text andperformance, between what happens in the narrative in the pastand the social discourse in the present. Adaptations activate thehistoricity of a play and mobilize differences to achieve an impactonstage and onscreen. They lead us away from an overdeterminedconcept of the canon.




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